Thursday, 27 August 2015

KDE Connect is an open source alternative to Pushbullet, which is an application that displays your Android notifications on your PC . However, KDE Connect also lets you send files to your devices, browse the files, and view the battery percentage, right from your Linux desktop or laptop.

This article will be focused on installing and using KDE Connect on Ubuntu-based distributions such as Linux Mint and of course, Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install kdeconnect indicator-kdeconnect Once it is installed, simply run "KDE Connect Indicator" from the applications menu, or type "indicator-kdeconnect" in the terminal.

Now, turn on your favourite Android device and install the KDE Connect application from either Google Play or F-Droid.Finally, launch the app on your Android device and look down at your indicator panel/notification area/whatever you want to call it and you will see icons for either a phone or tablet, depending on what it detected your device as.

Click on one of the icons, and click "Request Pairing". You should get a notification on your Android device that you can accept. If you don't, try multiple times. You can also request pairing from your Android device, which will display a notification on your PC. This may work, but it requires a desktop environment that lets you click buttons inside notifications. For me, in XFCE it didn't work. In Cinnamon, it did.

If you still don't receive a request to pair the device, make sure your device and your computer are connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Note: If you have a firewall on your Linux PC such as GUFW, Make sure you have allowed ports 1714-1764 in both TCP and UDP incoming and outgoing. You only have to allow these ports in your local network, no port forwarding necessary.

Once your devices are paired, you can do things like send files to your Android device wirelessly, browse the device, and view the battery percentage.

Sending files to your device is easy with KDE Connect.

On the device side, you can do things such as remotely controlling your computer by using your Android device as a mouse, and there's also multimedia controls.

Saturday, 22 August 2015

No, not a utensil used for eating food, a "fork". This means a copy of the source code, turned into a new project. This is a popular activity in open source software. If some one doesn't like the way the development of an application is going, they can take the source code of said application and make an entirely new project out of it.

Firefox has multiple forks, but today I will be focusing on Pale Moon.

What is Pale Moon? Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox focused on "efficiency and ease of use". It is compatible with most Firefox addons. It does not have the "Australis" interface that is criticized among many Firefox users. It claims to be more stable than regular Firefox. It is faster and smoother than Firefox.

It is available for both Linux and Windows. The Linux installer is available here. The Windows version is available here. There is also a 3rd party PPA for Ubuntu, as well as a build for the OpenPandora.

I've recently switched back to Firefox on the desktop, for a few reasons. Reason #1 is that Firefox takes up way less ram. Reason #2 is addons.

Firefox has some of the best addons out there. Some of my favourites include DownThemAll, NoScript, Flashblock, Video DownloadHelper, and Greasemonkey, to name a few.

Firefox addons are more powerful than their Google Chrome counterparts. However, I woke up yesterday to I find out that Firefox is deprecating XPCOM and XUL-based addons.

What does this mean? A lot of addons won't work anymore. As mentioned on this post, addons such as DownThemAll will likely not work and the developers will probably not support them anymore. This includes any addons that let you do more "advanced" things.

Firefox is turning more and more into Chrome

The only upside to this is it will be easier for developers to make addons that work in both Google Chrome and Opera. However, if I wanted to use Chrome or Opera addons I would use Chrome or Opera, not Firefox!

Firefox is the most customizable and feature-rich web browser, and it should stay that way.

Monday, 17 August 2015

If you’re an Android power user, you’ll probably know about Xposed framework. If you’ve ever used a Custom ROM on your phone or tablet, you will know that these ROMs often come with additional features that are not available in stock Android.

Xposed framework allows you to use the stock ROM that comes with your device but with the benefit of ROM-like features, called “modules”.

Xposed Framework

Please remember that not every module works on every device, so keep the Xposed Disabler ZIP and a custom recovery handy if you get a bootloop.

Here is a list of my top recommended xposed modules, in no particular order.

Awesome Pop-up Video – This module allows you to watch videos in a tiny window that you can move and resize, which lets you multi task while you’re watching the video.

Blacklist – This module allows you to block certain numbers or texts, for example unwanted callers.

BootManager – This module allows you to disable certain applications from starting up. Why would a game need to run at boot?

NotifyClean – This module allows you to block certain applications from notifying you about something.

MinMinGuard – This module allows you to block ads on a per-app basis, and removes the empty space that the ad used to take up.

Greenify – This module saves battery life by preventing certain applications from waking your device up when you’re not using it.